Sony Corp. has hired FireEye’s Mandiant unit to assist it in cleaning up the mess left by a mass hacking with possible North Korean roots.

Several people familiar with the matter said the Mandiant forensics unit have been employed to both assist the Japanese electronics firm clean up its systems, as well as presumably assist in tracing the origin of the attack, according to the Reuters report.

Re/code reported November 28 that Sony Pictures Entertainment was exploring the possibility that the attack was launched by Chinese hackers working for the North Korean Government.

North Korea has previously threatened “merciless retaliation” against the United States and others nations due to the upcoming movie starring Seth Rogan and James Franco, “The Interview,” which depicts a CIA plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

The movie was produced by Australian company Village Roadshow Pictures and Seth Rogan’s production company Point Grey Pictures, however is being distributed by Columbia Pictures, a fully owned unit of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The group behind the hack, known as Guardians of Peace (#gop) attempted to blackmail Sony last week, publishing a list of files it had obtained including passwords, personal information, and copies of movies.

Over the weekend TorrentFreak reported that a number of Sony movie screeners were leaked online, believed to have been obtained during the hack had hit BitTorrent, including the Brad Pitt movie Fury, Mr. Turner and Annie.

Boosting security

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Mandiant specializes “in investigating large-scale intrusions performed by the most advanced threat groups” and incident response services that “use the intelligence gathered during each investigation to improve its consultants’ ability to identify the actions of the attacker, the scope of the compromise, the data loss, the steps required to remove the attacker and the approach required to re-secure the network.”

It’s worth noting that Mandiant also caters to assist with state-sponsored attacks, including “assistance with sensitive data theft from virtually every industry including biotech companies, software companies, defense contractors, national research labs, manufacturing companies, law firms, think tanks and multinational corporations.”

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